The most Pittable event in your own personal history/lifetime

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Almost put this in the You-Know-Where, but felt it more properly belonged here.

I’ll limit this to events which you personally endured, not so much political/worldwide occurences which you found disfavorable (unless they impacted you directly-e.g. if you lived in New Orleans during Katrina, then feel free to pit Dubya for not helping you and your fellow denizens more than he did).

Me, I’ll Pit my 2nd grade teacher, who managed, in one fell swoop, to not only cause my self-esteem to crater, but also made me distrust teachers for years afterwards. Her crime? Grading me (this was before gifted programs) on a much harsher curve than her other students-work which would give one of the “slow” kids an “A” would net me a “B” or even a “C”. Silly nun biotch.

2

The entire nation’s reaction to 9/11. I’ve never seen a bigger bunch of crybaby sissies in my entire life.

3

I pit the guy who set me up with the Dream Woman when I was twenty. We both loved poetry and Dostoevsky and tennis and Casablanca and Stephen Wright and Douglas Adams. Things were going splendidly until my hat came off and she saw I was mostly bald. The poor woman sprinted to the bathroom, and when she returned, her behavior changed from affectionate to polite.

Note to anyone reading: don’t set up bald guys on a date if the woman doesn’t know about the baldness.

God, I’ve never worn a hat since.

4

When my high school told all the black kids in my class that we needed to behave. Not the white kids. Not the mexicans, only the black kids.

Fuckers, I should have sued.

5

When my high school told all the black kids in my class that we needed to behave. Not the white kids. Not the mexicans, only the black kids.

Fuckers, I should have sued.

6

Jeeze, you took that so hard that it’s making you stutter, Rand. :smiley:

I’m still in the midst of one of the most Pittable events in my life - my brother-in-law is a real estate agent in town; we used him for buying our house six years ago, and he wasn’t very good. We didn’t use him for changing houses this summer, and he and my sister haven’t spoken to us since (they have quite clearly snubbed us more than once since then, so we’re not just guessing that they are mad at us over this). As far as we were concerned, we didn’t have any obligation to use him, especially since we aren’t close with them. He apparently did not agree, and seems content to give us a good old-fashioned shunning. (If we’d known he was going to be a pissy little baby over this, we might have sent off an email or something. We honestly didn’t think that the decisions we made over selling our house had anything to do with him.)

7

Reading this post could be my own “most pittable event.”

8

In recent memory-

  1. there was my boss when I worked at a crappy little restaurant who was not only terribly racist, but wanted me to carry out her racist dirty work. Like telling black customers who were sitting down to eat that they had to pay before I could serve them or adding a tip to their bill because she said otherwise they wouldn’t tip me. The comments and things like asking, “black people?” any time someone would be complaining on the phone were bad enough, but I generally refused to be her racist messenger. And that was on top of some blatant sexual harassment that was supposed to be okay because that was just the atmosphere of the place, but made me REALLY uncomfortable (I was like 14 at the time and it all seemed just a little too serious for me to find it funny).

  2. The other would probably be the weekend I spent a few months ago with my best friend (who is not in second grade) threw about six full-scale temper tantrums. It was a hard weekend for her, but not THAT hard. And when I say temper tantrum, I don’t mean like the snits my dad gets into in public where he bitches and stomps and sometimes chews out a clerk or waiter and I want to sink into the ground and emerge later to apologize and buy that person a candy bar. I mean like a toddler throws- screaming, thrashing on the ground, throwing things, kicking and hitting, wailing and crying, and some lovely grown-up touches like howling swear words and awful, nasty things and so on. One was at home and the rest were in various public places. The longest single tantrum (as in, in only one location and without any moments of near-sanity anywhere in there) went on about four hours.

And while I do know in retrospect that I could have dealt with it better (i.e. I should have bitchslapped her right there and told her to shut the fuck up and stop acting like a toddler or something), at the time I was just utterly shocked and humiliated by her behavior and was mostly focused on keeping her two-year-old son occupied and distracted (especially because a lot of the crap she was screaming was either directed at him or about him) and comforting her mother, who was in tears herself.

I did inform her later, once she had calmed down, that if she ever behaved that way again with me around, that would be the end of J&I, BFF.

eta: I am working on just saying, “wtf, no” in situations like this instead of getting all dumb and just going with it. And I’ve gotten better.

9

In progress: my cousin and his wife.

Cousin: Until about six years ago I didn’t like him much; a couple of events at that time led to full-blown hatred. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m related to this fuckwad, and the rest of my family feels the same way - including his own sister.

Less than a year ago his adopted son, who just turned 18, came forth with allegations that Cousin has been molesting him for years. While this is horrible for the kid, it is good news for the family: we’re all praying he gets locked up for a looooong time, and with any luck, he’ll get killed in prison. Or at least severely beaten on a regular basis.

Just a couple of weeks ago the investigation reached the point where enough evidence was gathered to have Cousin arrested. Happy day!

Cousin’s wife: she is siding with Cousin rather than her own son.

10

My entire half brother. He’s an asshole, a sneak-thief, and a jackal. He’s stolen hundreds of thousands from my dad and given him a stroke and a heart attack, but my dad won’t cut him off because of the grandkids. Currently, Dad’s buying his house for the third time.

11

When I was nineteen, my family went on a trip from the Chicago 'burbs to St. Louis in order to visit my half-brother for a few days. Starting the trip, I felt pretty crappy; I had a fever by the time we got there, and the next morning, I was damn near delirious. By evening, I’d started vomitting uncontrollably, and my parents decided to take me to the ER.

The waiting room visit was short; only about five-to-fifteen minutes, since those symptoms plus a stiff neck (from hotel pillows, but I didn’t know that) and a college-age demographic equals possible meningitis, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. I got a little private time with the intake person before they put me in a bed; I managed to tell her that I was on the Pill, but that I didn’t want my dad to know.

Two hours, a chest X-ray, an intraveneous anti-nausea drip and a few blood draws later, the ER doctor comes in. He tells me that my white count is really, really high. Okay. He tells me that I’m going to have to take Augmentin. Fine.

Then he says, “Now, I know you didn’t want me to say this in front of your father, but you should have been a good girl; the antibiotic will make the Pill not work.”

If I hadn’t been attached to an IV, and if I didn’t feel like I was dying, I would have jumped up and punched him. I mean. . .I was 19. Of age. I had specifically told them not to give him this information, because I didn’t want to have an Extremely Awkward Conversation ™ between bouts of vomitting. And “should have been a good girl?” Fucker.

I never reported it, though, because I don’t remember his name. And I know that it actually happened the way that I remember, because my dad and I talked about it years later. Ultimately, it ended up not being a huge deal (my dad just sort of said, “talk to your mother”), but still.

There are other things that are more serious (my aunt and uncle trying to emotionally blackmail my grandmother comes first in line), but that’s the most Pit-worthy one–it’s so totally, utterly, even freakin’ legally in the wrong. And that comment was outrageous enough to be truly WTF-inspiring.

12

A former boss: she was the principal of a very small private school I taught at part-time. I loved the job, loved the kids, and respected and admired her. Then, she wrote me a paycheck that bounced. I could have forgiven her that, but she avoided my calls, messages, and emails, until I said “I’m worried something has happened to you. I’ll be over at 8:00 a.m. to see if you’re okay”. Only then would she talk to me. She lied to me twice about when she would pay me back and acted all hurt when I didn’t believe she was coming to bring me a certified check. She never paid me for the bank fees either. Cost me about $1500 at a time when I had no money to spare.

Myself: for being stupid enough to believe a married man’s story about how his wife was having an affair, and he was leaving her, and blah blah blah. No, she wasn’t. No, he wasn’t. Yes, I did, and I regret it to this day.

13

My mother is one of the most eminently pittable people on the planet.

I pit the entire 17 years I lived under her cruel thumb, but probably the most pittable thing she did was look the other way while her 4th husband abused me, and then take out her rage on me as if I was her competition rather than her kid.

14

No doubt I mention it too often, but: in 2005 my stomach perforated and almost cost me my life. Now, several operations later, I still have problems, though this was the first year since 2003 I did not have an operation. Hooray!

15

Kidney stone, 1986.

Gallstones, 2004.

Incredible amounts of pain and suffering.

16

My stepfather, when I was about age 8-9.

There was some kind of weeks-long ongoing family drama going on, I don’t even remember what it was about. At some point I let slip in a conversation to someone else something that he wanted kept secret. Later on that night he beat me with a belt.

I love my stepfather dearly, and we get a long great now. But in the back of my mind I often entertain the thought that, 10-15 years from now when he’s feeble and can’t fight back, I’m going to beat him with a belt so he can feel what it feels like to get beaten and not be able to fight back, and he can get a taste of what he did to me lo those many years ago.

But I probably won’t.

17

It’s hard for me to think of the worst/most pittable event of my life, since I really don’t hold grudges at all.

Off the top of my head, the worst would have to be a toss up between two events.

A state finalist in swimming and a national qualifier that same year, I “flunked” my lifeguarding test. The instructor felt up a few girls while practicing saves. He then asked to practice on me. I refused, and offered for another student to practice on me instead. He insisted, and I refused yet again. Days later, he blatantly lied and said I’d done a save incorrectly. Nobody stood up for me. (When good people stand idly by…) It was outrageous. I had a 96% on my written exam. A kid who couldn’t complete two laps of the pool passed.

I bawled the whole way home. My mom blew me off, saying I should have let him do the illicit save. Being 15, I didn’t know how to sue or have a car to drive myself to the Red Cross and complain. It hurts to know you were better than everyone - not in the middle of the pact, but the best - and on a whim, flunked.

Another incident was while I was working in the computer labs while in college a couple years ago. An angry elderly man came into the lab, asked for a floppy drive, and was told (by me) that we didn’t have any. He found a computer with a floppy drive (I was new to this particular lab, it had the oldest computers, there weren’t any other floppy drives on the rest of campus) and proceeded to accuse me of laughing at him. Erm, what? He then screamed his bloody head off at me, making vague threats of me being kicked out of school, etc until my large male coworker got between us and ordered him to leave while I called campus police.

Police come talk to us; he wasn’t even ESCORTED out of the damn building; they just let him go to another lab.

The best part? I run a search of his name and find out he’s not staff, a student, or anything else, but the CHAIR of a department! And because of that (and possibly combined with the fact he’s one of a few minority professors), no action whatsoever was taken by my supervisors in banning him from the computer labs, even though in our handbooks it was made clear that the exact same behavior would result in the permanent expulsion from the computer labs.

I went to my supervisor, who did nothing and gave me NO response to my calls and emails. So I went to HER supervisor, who was furious at my boss, but still took no action, saying that I had to initiate anything against the professor. Uh, how exactly? For going over my supervisor’s head, I was fired - well, I was called into a meeting where I told them I quit, and she angrily told me that no, I was fired.

Either way, the last story (about the incident, not the firing) probably sealed the deal in getting my awesome internship in June.

18

People being scared and upset after a big terrorist attack = pittable? What’s next, pitting the Japanese for being freaked out after Hiroshima?

19

Both rapes.
That and Apartheid.

20

When my dad was dying I stood over his bed and asked him how he felt. How it feels to be helpless and know someone could do anything to you and you wouldn’t be able to stop them. I’m so glad I did that. I have a picture of him on my wall though, aged about four, to remind me that he was once a child too. He robbed me of my innocence way before that age and after.